Accu-Chek Aviva Expert

This is a look at the new Accu-Chek Expert from Roche and it's using a lot of its pump technology for its blood test meter. It has got a lot to do with carbohydrate counting and bolus advice and what it has, probably above and beyond what a lot of the other meters have right now, is a colour screen. The Accu-Chek Expert also gives you advice on what units to give yourself.

The Accu-Chek Expert will have been set up with your diabetes specialist nurse. As you set it up you need to plug in your insulin sensitivity and your carbohydrate to insulin ratios through the day.

As with all of the Accu-Chek meters, when you get your pot of sensors, it comes with a chip that you put in the side and it means you don’t have to code in any other way. Once that’s in there it's matched up with your pot of strips.

In the back go AAA batteries which is another relatively nice innovation. People like the security of knowing that you can get those batteries from any garage, you don’t have to go to a specialist shop.

The strips are easy enough to use; the branded side goes up and the gold bit goes in. If you want to download the data onto your computer, then there’s an infrared port and you can take it through Smartpix, which will pull it into your PC, and you can do other things with the data there.

Once I put the strip in, it lights up and tells me what to do on a nice, big colour screen. It double-checks the code with your pot of sensors with the chip on there. The kit comes with the Accu-Chek Multiclix. When you charge up with a new fresh lancet up there, stick it in to charge it and then you discharge it by clicking here - and it really doesn’t hurt at all. 

On you go with your blood. And you can see a little timer flashing away. It gives you a bunch of choices and you can scroll up and down and enter bits. Is it mealtime? No, it's not. Am I having carbohydrates? No, I’m not.

If you press the central button, like on a remote for a TV, you press the central bit for OK. You can put in things, no entry, fasting, exercise one, stress, illness, exercise two and even pre-menstrual.

Ladies tend to be insulin resistant pre-periods; your oestrogen acts as a bit of a dampener on your insulin; so pre-period you’re probably going to have slightly high blood sugars. In this case, I’m not actually going to enter anything because I’m not really going to do anything particularly unusual after this.

You can pre-programme exercise one and exercise two. Exercise one might be walking to work, so it’s a twenty-minute walk to the station or something. Exercise two might be an hour of playing squash and in both cases, you’re going to need a little less insulin and that’s part of the factoring that the algorithm will do for you.

Also, it’s got something for active insulin because as we all know, sometimes you do a blood test and it might say 14.4 - but you know you’ve just had breakfast, you’ve just had your insulin and you know it’s still doing its job. It’s still got like a two hour profile that its doing and you wouldn’t want to pop any more insulin on top because chances are, it’s already on its way down and if you ram a bit more insulin in, it’s going to really go down.

What I also think is really groovy about this machine, it’s very easy to use and I think it’s quite intuitive. You’ve also got a little button for the light and I don’t care what anyone says, I think having a light on these meters makes a big difference. A lot of us blood test at night-time.

It’s also got some nice little rubberised wedges and feet, so if you’ve got it on the table, then it’s not going to move around too much.

The handbook that comes with it is very clear and easy to understand and as part as the whole set up, when you’re given this machine, is a book on carbs and cals which also helps.

This meter is particularly good if you’re either new to diabetes, especially type 1 diabetes, or if you’re relatively new to carb counting because this is really going to help you relate your blood test results to your food and your own insulin usage and profile.